Are They Trying to Go Out of Business?
Are They Trying to Go Out of Business?
March 17, 2024, 9:32 pm
Filed under: business, economics, writing | Tags: business, drugstores, enshittification, locking up the stuff, Postal Service, Rot Economy, shoplifting, toothpaste, USPS, zines
A while back, I wrote about how they started locking up the toothpaste at my chain pharmacy/drugstore. Since then the drugstore has only expanded their lock-up program. Now, they lock up soap and deodorant and vitamins and eye drops and much more. There were a lot of news stories about this; These big drug stores (CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, etc) were claiming that there was a massive theft problem at their stores and they needed help to fix it.
But then, those stories were debunked. Not only has theft not gone up, it has, in fact, gone down. It turns out that these big drug stores are attempting to make more money by getting governments to pay for their security — because of all this CRIME that’s increasing. This has worked for them. Here In New York, our governor just launched an initiative that would give these places a tax break and provide extra security for them.
And this is after the idea of a shoplifting crime wave has been debunked. Despite the reporting that reveals that the “crime wave” numbers’ only source was a lobbying group, these places are apparently still crying “shoplifting” wolf and given Hochul’s response, they’re getting away with it, big time.
I guess they’re still trying to push this fiction because they’re locking up more stuff than ever before and I know at least three people who don’t buy stuff there because of it. Are they trying to go out of business?
The only reason I go in to the drugstore where they lock up the toothpaste is because my prescriptions got transferred there when my more local pharmacy stopped taking my insurance. Then, the pharmacy I wanted to transfer to went out of business last year. These big drug stores push out the little shops so they are the only place to buy vitamins or toothpaste or whatever — but then they lock up those things and drive us right into Amazon’s arms. And once the Vitamin D is being delivered to me, why would I go back to the drug store?
Then I started to think about all this and the post office. Every year I mail out the zines I make for my patrons on Patreon. Every year, I bring the envelopes to the post office, get the stamps required to mail them, affix them and off they’d go around the world. Mailing day was kind of a fun annual ritual. This year, though, when I went to the very same postal worker as the year before, she told me that my zines were books and must be mailed as parcels. This process was twice as expensive and required that the postal worker type in the zip code for every single package, print two labels for each and then affix them to the envelope. It took ages and the line behind me grew and grew as the afternoon went on. There was only one window open and I was at it.
Type. (Clickety clickety clickety.) Press Yes. Wait. Wait Again. Okay they’ve printed. Stick. Stick. Throw it in the mail bin. Next. Repeat twenty times.
They had a perfectly reasonable system for years. Many years. I’ve been making these for eight years, I think? But some policy change means that a perfectly efficient system of mailing little envelopes of homemade goodness has become twice as expensive and an incredible time-waster at the post office, not just for me but for the workers and all the customers in line.
I didn’t send all of them, though. To send these zines to Europe this time, they told me, would cost $20 so I decided I would explore some other options. It just doesn’t make sense to pay $20 to send 27 pieces of paper over the ocean. As I walked home from the post office I thought, “Are they TRYING to go out of business?” And then I remembered how Trump had appointed DeJoy as Postmaster General and remembered how we still have that guy in the top postal job. He’s a businessman who seems wants to run the Post Office into the ground and so I thought, “Yeah, I guess they ARE trying to go out of business!”
Everywhere it feels like business are trying to go out of business. So many places don’t worry about alienating their customers. Every tech platform has gone through an intense enshittification and everything seems to be falling victim to the Rot Economy (a concept I heard about on a podcast). It would seem that the preferred way to do business these days is to try to go out of business. It goes like this. First, create a business that meets people’s needs. Then kill any other businesses that might meet people’s needs in a way similar to yours. Then provide only the most minimal service one can provide and throw up as many obstacles as possible.
The thing is, even though they seem to be trying to go out of business, in a lot of cases, they’ve grown “too big to fail” so they remain. And we all just get more and more frustrated. Anyway — I don’t get anything but my drugs at the drugstore anymore and I just went to a different post office to mail my international zines at a more sensible rate. Hilariously, though, at that post office, their system was down and only the self-service kiosk was working. Someone came in with a big package and they told her she’d have to go to a different post office. “I’ll just come back tomorrow,” she said. But they told her it wasn’t likely to be fixed tomorrow. (Why would that neighborhood need a working post office?!) Giving our post offices inadequate tech seems like yet another way to send the post office out of business. I don’t mind if the big drug stores take themselves out of business with their silly locking the stuff up policies. Maybe we’d get our local pharmacies back in that scenario. But the post office? I’d very much like for our country to have a reasonable postal system again
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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on March 18, 2024.
